The government is planning to abolish Income Support

I've known about this since news of it appeared on the home ed lists a couple of weeks ago, and wearily thought it was about time I got around to blogging it. It's a DWP Green Paper setting out "plans for improving support and work incentives to create a system that rewards responsibility".

My thoughts about it won't surprise anyone, but I'll set them out briefly here, for clarity:

• "Improving support" is one thing, but trying to make the take-up of that 'support' compulsory is a whole other, less ethical thing. I wish they'd stop dressing up coercion and trying to pretend it's something else.


• My dictionary definition of the word 'work' does not imply that this solely consists of activities known about and condoned by the government for which money is received and tax paid. Our language is being manipulated to suit HM Treasury.


• Responsibility has its own reward, thank you very much. I have lots of responsibility, and lots of reward.


• The incentive to do paid work would presumably be the salary. Is this not enough?


• Children are not best brought up by strangers in institutions, while both of their parents are in paid employment. This will dehumanise them, making it difficult for them to put down roots and know where they belong in the world. Two hours of frantic and fraught parental care in the evening plus one in the morning does not constitute an upbringing, by the way.


• Fine: abolish Income Support. It's not fair that the slightly more wealthy in this country should be made to fund the slightly less wealthy anyway. But give us back our birthright instead. Give us access to our land again, so that we can build houses for ourselves that we can afford to live in, produce our own food and give our children the freedom and space to play and learn, instead of trying to make slaves out of us and prisoners out of our children.

I've made use of the word 'trying' a couple of times in the above points, because luckily, try is all the government can do. People will still find ways of avoiding the traps, no matter how carefully they're set. Family life is too precious to throw away for the sake of a few pounds.

For what it's worth, there's to be a consultation on this, to which I will probably be contributing, even though I think it's a waste of time because the decision has been made now by both major political parties and the only real debate is about how it will be implemented.